She Said "I Overslept, I'm on My Way." The Morning Anchor Never Made It to Work. Jodi Huisentruit.

At four-ten in the morning on Tuesday, June 27, 1995, a producer at a small TV station in Mason City, Iowa, picked up the phone.

The station's morning news anchor had not come in. She was supposed to be there already.

The producer called her apartment. The anchor answered. She said she had overslept. She said she was getting ready and would be right there.

She never got there.

When police went to her apartment building, they found her things scattered in the parking lot. Her red high heels. A bent car key. Neighbors said they had heard screams.

Her name was Jodi Huisentruit. She was twenty-seven years old. And nobody has seen her since.

Who was Jodi Huisentruit?

Jodi Sue Huisentruit was born on June 5, 1968, in Long Prairie, Minnesota. She was the youngest daughter in her family.

In high school she played golf, and her team won the state tournament in 1985 and 1986.

She graduated from St. Cloud State University in 1990. Her first job was as a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines. But what she really wanted to do was television news.

She worked her way up through small stations in Minnesota and Iowa. She worked at a station in Alexandria, Minnesota. She worked at KGAN in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, as the bureau chief in Iowa City. By 1995, she was the morning anchor at KIMT, a CBS station in Mason City, Iowa. She hosted the early show, called Daybreak.

People in town knew her face. She was the person they had breakfast with every morning.

The day before

On Monday, June 26, 1995, Jodi played in a golf tournament.

Afterward, she went to the home of a man in Mason City, to watch a birthday video he had made for her earlier that month.

Then she went home to bed. She had to be up very early. Morning anchors start work in the middle of the night.

4:10 a.m.

That night, Jodi overslept.

At four-ten in the morning, KIMT producer Amy Kuns called her apartment. Jodi picked up. She said she had overslept and was getting ready to leave.

At six o'clock, Daybreak went on the air. Jodi still had not arrived. Amy Kuns filled in for her.

At seven-thirteen, someone at the station called the Mason City police.

The parking lot

What police found in the apartment parking lot made it clear something had gone very wrong.

Near her car, there were signs of a struggle.

Her things were scattered across the area. Her red high heels. A bent car key.

Police recovered a palm print from a nearby pole. It has never been identified.

At least three neighbors said they had heard screams around the time Jodi would have been leaving for work.

And one neighbor said that at about the same time, a white Ford Econoline van had been sitting in the lot with its engine running. Nobody has ever established whether that van had anything to do with Jodi.

The search

The search for Jodi was huge.

Mason City police and private investigators have done more than a thousand interviews over the years. Her family hired private investigators in 1995. The case was featured on America's Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries.

In May 1996, about a hundred volunteers searched part of the county. Nothing was found.

In November 1995, there was even a televised meeting with a psychic. It produced leads. None of them produced evidence.

Every few years, a new search would be announced, and the town would hold its breath. And every time, the searchers came back with nothing.

In 2001, Jodi Huisentruit was declared legally dead.

In 2003, supporters started a website, FindJodi.com, to keep her case in the public eye and collect tips.

The journal

In 2008, there was a strange twist.

Someone mailed photocopies of Jodi's personal journal, eighty-four pages, to the local newspaper, the Globe Gazette.

The journal was evidence in the case. The person who mailed it turned out to be the wife of a former Mason City police chief.

Police never gave a reason for why the copy was made, or why it was mailed.

For a case already short on hard evidence, it raised an uncomfortable question. If a copy of the journal had left the police file once, what else had been handled carelessly over the years?

Persons of interest

Over the years, four men have been publicly discussed as persons of interest in this case. We are not naming any of them. None of them has ever been charged, or even named as a suspect by police.

The first was the man who hosted the birthday video the night before. In 2017, police got a warrant to put GPS trackers on his vehicles. An investigator later said the idea was to see if he would lead them to a burial site. He did not. He died in December 2024.

The second was a man who was later known as a serial rapist, who lived two blocks from the KIMT station at the time.

The third was the ex-husband of Jodi's childhood best friend. In October 2024, police searched a wooded site in Winsted, Minnesota, next to a house he once owned. In November 2025, they went back to check a property there that had recently been torn down. They brought a search dog. Nothing significant was found. Police said, "This is an open investigation."

The fourth was a suspected serial killer whose girlfriend lived in Mason City at the time.

None of this has produced proof of what happened to Jodi.

Each of these men was looked at for different reasons. A personal connection. Living nearby. A criminal history. None of those reasons is evidence of what happened in that parking lot. And that is the problem with this case. There are plenty of people to wonder about, and almost nothing that points to any one of them.

In July 2025, Hulu released a three-part documentary series about the case. In December 2025, a private investigator doubled a reward for information leading to Jodi's remains, to one hundred thousand dollars.

What we still don't know

Thirty years later, the case is still open with the Mason City Police Department and the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.

We do not know who was in that parking lot. We do not know who left the palm print. We do not know if the van had anything to do with it. And we do not know where Jodi is.

What we know is this. A young woman who was on her way to work, after telling her producer she would be right there, was taken from the parking lot of her own building, in the dark, with neighbors hearing her scream.

If you have any information about Jodi Huisentruit, contact the Mason City Police Department, or submit a tip through FindJodi.com.

What do you think happened that morning?